ABSTRACT
The choice of subject matter of this chapter, newspaper discourse, was made for two main reasons. The first is that the language of news reporting has long been an exemplary topic in the discourse analytic traditions highlighted in Chapter 1. Political news in particular is of major interest within the critical discourse analysis (CDA) paradigm, with many studies focusing on the discursive constructions of ideologically charged issues like immigration and racism (Charteris-Black, 2004; Teo, 2000; Van Dijk, 1991). The second reason is that the variable of time is of intuitive relevance to understanding newspaper discourse, perhaps more so than any other case study context in this book. Researchers have tracked linguistic elements of newspapers across different time spans from historical periods (Partington, 2010) to the shorter-term unfolding of a single major event like 9/11 (Altheide, 2006), investigating issues from general stylistic change to how media facilitates social control. It may initially seem challenging to reconcile the deep interpretative character of CDA with the fact that newspaper discourse is periodical and hence too proliferative for comprehensive analysis. Corpus techniques to handle large volumes of data like keywords, collocational and concordance analysis have provided welcome solutions as their findings have been shown to be amenable to CDA-oriented interpretation (Baker, Gabrielatos, Khosravinik, Mcenery, & Wodak, 2008; Gabrielatos & Baker, 2008; Stubbs, 1996). There are particularly compelling grounds to begin with (lemmatized) single words and phrases and then “fanning out” to examine their concordances in view of the prevailing social, political, historical and/or cultural context. These words/phrases are either predetermined conceptual or lexical entities like “moral panic” (Partington, 2010) and “elderly” (Mautner, 2007), or inductively emerge as salient keywords 94in the data. Either strategy can support CDA research by providing a tractable starting point and grounding the analysis upon objectively verifiable information rather than preconceptions.
